Posts Tagged «power»

The super-laser being built by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will put all others to shame with 1 petawatt of power at 10Hz. The HAPLS laser will sit at the heard of the ELI-Beamlines facility in Europe after it has been thoroughly tested.

Wireless power transmission is fantastic in theory — but in practice, due to some pesky laws of physics, the range of transmission is extremely limited. Yes, you can now charge your phone by putting it on a wireless power transfer plate, but that plate still needs to be plugged into the wall, and — more importantly — you still have to remember to put your phone on the plate. What would really make wireless power transmission (WPT) useful is if you could power a device that’s still in your hands or pocket. By using metamaterials, Duke University might have discovered a way of doing just that.

While there are hopes of one day channeling photosynthetic outputs directly to our needs, many key details of the process, including the actual efficiency, are still incompletely known. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have just received a big grant to map the molecular events that take place inside one the most complex biological machines known to man — a group of electron-shuffling proteins known as photosystem II.

Believe it or not, the first cold fusion power plant is now available to pre-order. The E-Cat 1MW Plant, which comes in a standard shipping container, can produce one megawatt of thermal energy, using low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) — a process, often known as cold fusion, that fuses nickel and hydrogen into copper, producing energy 100,000 times more efficiently than combustion. It sounds like E-Cat is now taking orders for delivery in early 2014, priced fairly reasonably at $1.5 million. Has cold fusion — the answer to all our energy needs — finally made its way to market?

The National Ignition Facility in California has become the first fusion power facility to create a fusion reaction that generates more power than it requires to get the reaction started. This is perhaps the most important step ever towards the always-just-out-of-reach realization of clean, self-sustaining, limitless fusion power.

In a speech on Sunday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe admitted that the situation is too serious to be left to just one country’s expertise. “My country needs your knowledge and expertise,” he said.

So you’ve designed the perfect carbon capture process, cheap and easily installed in everything from coal power plants to car exhaust systems. Everything works perfectly, and not a single hydrocarbon escapes its net. Congratulations, you’ve solved one of humanity’s most pressing problems — but you’ve also created another. All that carbon may not be in the air, but it still exists. What do we do with the solid carbon byproducts in our quest to save the atmosphere?

For a while now, battery tech has been one of the biggest bottlenecks through which future devices and impressive features must squeeze before they arrive. Progress on that front, as you may have noticed by your phone dying during your commute every night, has been slow. Instead of moving forward, though, battery advances can move sideways. Wireless charging is at the forefront of these sideways advances, and a new system in which an e-ink display can be wirelessly charged via NFC proves just that.

Before the age of the smartphone, mobile phone manufacturers were locked in an arms race to see who could create a smaller, but still usable device. Smartphones came along, and now the arms race is more or less focused on how big a screen can be while still being accepted by consumers. During this arms race, the way to keep phones from being unwieldy is to make them thin. Researchers have created a new supercapacitor so small that if it were used in smartphones, could make the devices even thinner and lighter than they are now.

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